So some time has passed and our game Ace Tales has been featured by Google. We didn’t know quite what to expect, but hoped of course that we would reach huge amount of downloads. Let’s see what has happened so far:

So the featuring started May 15 on a Thursday, and immediately we saw a nice rise in our downloads. We had been hoovering around 100-200 downloads/day before, we didn’t succeed with a good launch for the game even though we tried our best to do so. In fact, the launch went worse than our first game Daredogs. The reason is that we actually got quite lucky with Daredogs, getting it in to the right places right from the start.

Time passed: 13 days

Total amount of downloads: 72848

Average downloads/day: 5600

Two weeks has passed now and the featuring is still going at about the same pace, the first week Ace Tales was featured in 6-8 places in Google Play Store and 45 places on the Google Play Homepage. We suspect the Google Play Homepage featuring to have quite a little effect on downloads, the store featuring is much more important since people mostly find games by scrolling in the store itself.

After the first week our featuring places actually increased a lot. One would suspect the downloads would increase substantially? They actually decreased a little bit. Why is this? The featuring places vary a lot, there are spots both category wise and country wise. So it is obvious that there is a big difference on which spots you happen to get. In the latter week we have been featured in many countries in the “Action and Adventure” category. This means users have to scroll down to that category, click “see more” and scroll down to Ace Tales. In many countries there are tens of applications in this category, sharing on the visibility.

The worrying news?

It looks like an average of 5600 downloads/day for two weeks for a game like Ace Tales just isn’t enough to shoot it up in rankings to get any organic downloads. This is very bad news, since it means that it’s really though to get up in the lists for people to find you. User acquisition can easily be estimated to be between $0,50-1, meaning this featuring is worth $35 000 – 70 000. Below you can see how far up Ace Tales came in App Annie rankings before starting to fall down again. We suspect the featuring to end this week, it will be interesting to see if the downloads disappear completely right after. Come back to the aftermath report next week! Subscribe to the right to get the update to your mail.